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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I don’t have a Mac Mini, but for always-on systems, the idle power consumption can become quite significant.

    • Gaming PCs can consume up to 100W (876 kWh / year).
    • My AMD B650 NAS consumes about 17W in idle (150 kWh / year).
    • A NUC / Mac Mini can idle as low as 5W (44 kWh / year).

    If you pay 0.30$/kWh, running your old 100W gaming PC all the time would cost you 263$ per year. My NAS is 45$ per year…

    It also depends on what you need/want from the machine. The Mac Mini doesn’t have any HDDs and can’t run a regular Linux distro, for example.



  • I’ve also recently built my own NAS and I’ve gone through similar considerations. One of my mayor decisions was not to use btrfs because it’s not recommended for Raid Z1/Raid 5. With that, I landed on ZFS and TrueNAS Scale. Note that RAID expansion should be landing in both very soon.

    Things with TrueNAS were pretty easy, very quick, and everything worked nicely. However, I noticed that it was constantly accessing the disks and preventing them from spinning down. I really wanted to keep the power consumption low (<20 W idle), so I eventually decided to just go with Vanilla Debian + ZFS. I can recommend that if you want to tinker with things yourself. Otherwise, I’d recommend TrueNAS Scale.

    As for migration, you might be able to create a degraded pool initially, copy over the data, and add the parity disk last. Raid expansion would ofc also help there…












  • Would you mind explaining how introducing ranked choice voting would substantially help smaller/additional political parties? I always find it confusing how much Americans focus on the presidency and ranked choice voting when it comes to breaking the party duopoly. At the end of the day, there is only a single president and he/she will probably always come from one of the largest parties. The presidency somewhat inherently limits the influence of smaller parties.

    What I would focus on, if I wanted to increase the number of political parties in the US, is the House of Representatives. If proportional representation (e.g. biproportional appointment, party lists, MMP, …) was introduced there, it would allow smaller parties to hold real power. (With biproportional appointment, the seats are distributed according to party voter share while also ensuring regional representation). Do you know why this hardly ever comes up in the context of the US?